What is Translation Error Rate (TER)?

Translation Error Rate (TER) is a method used by Machine Translation specialists to determine the amount of Post-Editing required for machine translation jobs. The automatic metric measures the number of actions required to edit a translated segment inline with one of the reference translations. It’s quick to use, language independent and corresponds with post-editing effort. When tuning your KantanMT engine, we recommend a maximum score of 30%. A lower score means less post-editing is required!

How to use TER in KantanBuildAnalytics™

The TER scores for your engine are displayed in the KantanBuildAnalytics™ feature. You can get a quick overview or snapshot in the summary tab. But for a more in depth analysis and to calculate the amount of post-editing required for the engine’s MT output select the ‘TER Score’ tab, which takes you to the ‘TER Scores’ page.

Place your cursor on the ‘TER Scores Chart’ to see the ‘Translation Error Rate’ for each segment. If you hold the cursor over the segment, a pop-up will appear on your screen with details of each segment under these headings, ‘Segment no.’, ‘Score’, ‘Source’, ‘Reference/Target’ and ‘KantanMT Output’.

To see a breakdown of the ‘TER Scores’ for each segment in a table format scroll down. You will now see a table with the headings ‘No’, ‘Source’, ‘Reference/Target’, ‘KantanMT Output’ and ‘Score’.

To see an even more in depth breakdown of a particular ‘Segment’ click on the ‘Triangle’ beside each number.

To download the ‘TER Scores’ of all segments click on the ‘Download’ button on the ‘TER Scores’ page.

This is one of the many features included in KantanBuildAnalytics, which can help the Localization Project Manager improve an engine’s quality after its initial training. To see other features used in KantanBuildAnalytics please see the links below.